First Week

The first week was comprised of orientation classes and cultural teachings. I will spare you all the boring details of the lectures of how to study, research topics and general bookkeeping. The most important things that happened this week were the interaction between the 92 students from 22 different countries.

The first big hurdle was in the learning of the name pronunciation. It’s not too hard if everybody had a name like Bob, Mark, or Jen, but this was simply not the case. The majority of the students here are from the Middle East, Africa, or the sub-continent. As you can imagine, their names are not quite like those found in America. Just for starters, I have meet Ahmed, Hatem, Mehmet, Amro, and Zaid just to name a few. Another difficult aspect to these names is since they have Arabic roots, there are certain sounds which we are not used to in English. All of this coupled with over 90 names to learn, it has been a bit hard. But, eventually I have caught on.

The grouping in Masdar has been a bit of a social experiment. People from all over the globe all share one common goal, to help advance the world to one based on renewable energy instead of fossil fuels. Other the other hand, there are many different religious and cultural background shared between the students. It has been a great experience to talk to everybody and share their views on various topics. One thing I have noticed is that people from the same religious and language background tend to group together. Personally, my main group has been with the people from Europe and the US. While I have made many friends from different areas of the world, the groups do tend to cluster towards shared backgrounds. Interesting.